Pastel color palettes
Six soft schemes, five colors each, every hex copyable. Ordered dark to light so the structure is visible.
A pastel is a hue at low saturation and high lightness, and the whole difficulty of the style is that this definition leaves no room for contrast. Five true pastels side by side is a scheme with no hierarchy at all: pretty as a swatch row, unusable as an interface. Every palette below therefore breaks the rule once, with a muted mid-tone or a soft charcoal doing the job that a pastel cannot.
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Powder
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Sorbet
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Sea glass
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Cotton
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Macaron
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Nursery
If you take one thing from this page: pastels are grounds, not ink. Almost no true pastel reaches 4.5:1 against white, and most sit under 2:1, so body text in a pastel is not a style choice, it is a page nobody can read. Set your text in the darkest color in the row, or in a near-black that borrows a little of the palette's hue, which keeps the softness without the failure. This is also why pastel schemes tend to look better with generous whitespace than with large flat fills: the airiness is doing the work the contrast cannot.
Other palettes.
Same format, different mood. Every hex on every one of them copies in a click.
- Fall color palettes Rust, ochre and oxblood, each row anchored by one genuinely dark brown.
- Winter color palettes Two families that behave nothing alike: quiet blue-grays, and forward jewel tones.
- Spring color palettes Fresh greens and blossom pinks, kept from going saccharine by one dark leaf green.
- Summer color palettes Sea blues, sun yellows and coral, with a deep blue doing the structural work.
- Neutral color palettes Warm and cool neutrals. Not gray: every color carries the same faint hue bias.
- Retro color palettes Four decades kept apart, because mixing them is what makes retro read as wrong.
All thirteen palette collections · Pull a palette out of an image · Check a pair for contrast
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you already have.
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